Despite last-minute funding problems, last week's Brisbane Writers' Festival was a great success. The director, Michael Campbell, last year moved the event from riverside marquees to the State Library of Queensland and while some visitors missed the setting and free sessions, many more enjoyed the orderly, air-conditioned new venue. Attendances rose by about 20 per cent to 30,000-plus, even with 10 per cent fewer sessions, and the festival had a fresh energy and an iimaginative guest list.

Campbell says costs increase by a 15 per cent a year but state and city funding did not rise, so he had to raise $100,000 from sponsors and philanthropists to save his schools' program and complete his imaginative wish-list of 266 guests.

Chris Abani, a Nigerian writer unknown to Australians, gave a dazzling opening address and his book Song For Night, about an African boy soldier, became the festival's second bestseller. It was outsold only by a surprise hit, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist who explains how brain plasticity can counter dementia, strokes, autism and other damage. Both books come from Melbourne's independent publisher Scribe.

Other top sellers were Bomb, Book And Compass by Simon Winchester; Hamlet: A Novel by John Marsden; Someone Knows My Name by Canada's 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner, Lawrence Hill; The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville; The Cellist Of Sarajevo by Canadian Steven Galloway; One Book, Many Brisbanes, a short story anthology about the city; Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin; My Guantanamo Diary by US lawyer Mahvish Khan; and Mahtab's Story by Libby Gleeson.

An impressive Canadian contingent also included Yann Martel, author of the 2002 Man Booker Prize winner Life Of Pi, who will speak at Gleebooks on Sunday at 4pm.

Also popular at the Brisbane Writers' Festival was Nam Le, author of the acclaimed short story collection The Boat. Le was born in Vietnam, studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now fiction editor of the Harvard Review but we consider him Australian because he grew up here. So we are proud to see him shortlisted for Britain's 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £60,000 ($132,000) for "the best young writer in the world". See thedylanthomasprize.com.

Only two well-known, full-time writers - Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon - appear on Esquire's list of the world's 75 most influential people. A more generous interpretation, however, can include these names from the eclectic line-up: Samantha Power, Lisa Randall, Noah Feldman, Bjorn Lomborg, Mehmet Oz, Jim Webb, Parag Khanna, Rory Stewart, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, as well as Bill Gates and published politicians Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

As Galleycat, an American blog, points out, there are "other people on the list who are of no small significance to the book world: Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg and Oprah Winfrey".

Vanity Fair'sNew Establishment list, on the other hand, has no writers unless you count Bill Clinton, Stewart and Colbert along with Arianna Huffington and Frank Rich. Murdoch, Bezos, Bloomberg and Winfrey all appear again. As Galleycat complains, "Heck, even if the ability to create a cottage industry around oneself were the only benchmark, James Patterson could've made the cut, or J.K. Rowling - remember, she's now powerful enough to keep other people's books from being published!"

Yann Martel has had plenty of time to consider why his novel Life Of Pi is the biggest-ever bestseller among winners of the Man Booker Prize. Since September 11, 2001, when he launched his fable about a shipwrecked Indian boy adrift on a raft with a Bengal tiger, it has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, 150,000 of them in Australia.

As well as the adventurous story, he says, the appeal lies in "the lack of cynicism or irony in the book. We live in cynical times." The book explores the meaning of faith, with the character Pi studying Christianity, Hinduism and Islam before spending 227 days in the Indian Ocean with a tense and shrinking huddle of zoo animals. "People say now it was topical. But for the four years I was working on it, religion was not fashionable."

Seven years is a long time between books for Martel's fans but he has not been idle. The Canadian writer, visiting Australia for the first time, talked about Pi at last week's Brisbane Writers' Festival and will do so again this weekend in Sydney, as he makes a nine-month journey around the world with his wife, Alice Kuipers. They met at Britain's Cheltenham Literature Festival and Kuipers, a London-born writer, followed Martel to remote Saskatoon, which is still home between trips.

"When I finish a book, I like to travel," he says. His next book is finally written, though it won't appear until 2010, and it makes the whimsical Pi seem almost prosaic. A 20th-Century Shirt is two books in one: read the novel then flip the book over and read a related essay, or vice versa.

The novel is "a non-literal representation of the Holocaust", a conversation between a talking monkey and donkey that live like termites on a man's shirt, which is also a country with provinces such as Left Pocket. The essay argues that the Holocaust is unusual among historical events because the stories we tell about it are all factual. World War II has inspired novels and movies that are comedies, romances and horrors. But reverence for the Holocaust has constrained writing to historical accounts and personal memoirs.

Victims of any tragedy naturally want the truth told, Martel says. "But we really absorb history when we can play with it; it becomes more digestible. My wish is to serve the victims. Most of us have to translate bulky history into more portable stories. We have to allow Holocaust comedies, Holocaust thrillers ... Otherwise it becomes sacrosanct and eventually we would stop telling stories about the Holocaust and it would become hoary history covered in dust."
Martel acknowledges that the Holocaust is especially politicised in the United States and less so in Europe where there is "a weary familiarity". He insists, "I don't mean to be polemical. I don't mean to rile anyone up."

At 45 the long-ago philosophy graduate is earnest and ingenuous, curious and reflective. "Professional philosophy tired me but I'm interested in big questions and trying to find answers. I'm not interested in grand systems but more in thinking about the way we live."
Why does he like animals as characters? "Not for romantic reasons. If you're telling a story about a dentist from Woolloomooloo, people have preconceptions. If it's a donkey from Woolloomooloo, they would say, 'That's interesting'. It's easier to suspend the readers' disbelief."

There's a link, perhaps, between Martel's writing and George Orwell's Stalinist allegory, Animal Farm. And despite his protests, he can be quite polemical. Last year he began a "guerilla campaign" to interest the Canadian Prime Minister in books. Every two weeks he sends him a book and posts the title and a critique on a website called whatisstephenharperreading.ca. The first was The Death Of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy, the second Animal Farm, the latest Anthem by Ayn Rand; there are plays, poetry, Agatha Christie and contemporary writers - all short books.

"It's not that someone who reads is a better person," he says, "but in Western society we believe reading is important. I don't think Stephen Harper since leaving school has read a poem or a novel and I wonder if there's a problem with having a male leader whose imagination is not nursed at all by the arts."

Of course, Harper does not read the books and Martel has had only a perfunctory letter of thanks from his office. "I think that reflects that in a sense I have caught him out. No one is proud of not reading. When asked what his favourite book was he said The Guinness Book Of World Records. It might have been a joke but he is not a man known for his humour."

Yann Martel will speak at Gleebooks in Sydney on Sunday at 4pm. Bookings on 96602333.

Undercover (August 16-17) wondered whether the judges of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Awards would bestow their $100,000 tax-free prizes on worthy veterans (such as
Tom Keneally, David Malouf and Germaine Greer on the short lists) or needy mid-career authors (for example, Dorothy Porter, Malcolm Knox and Paul Ham). They went a step further and chose Philip Jones, a historian and first-time author of Ochre And Rust, and first-time novelist Steven Conte for The Zookeeper's War.

When I spoke to Conte last month he wasn't even contemplating a win; it is good to know that when he loses his job as deputy principal of a University of Melbourne college (closing for a year), he can write full-time without money worries. I have not yet read either winning book but it will be exciting if the PM's money launches valuable careers. Kevin Rudd told him he had only glanced at the novel the previous evening; like John Howard, he prefers biography.

Held at Parliament House in Canberra on a Friday evening, the PM's event was short on literary editors from major newspapers. (More importantly, most shortlisted authors were lured there by not knowing who had won.) I was, instead, at the University of Technology, Sydney to hear a brilliant lecture on writing and teaching biography by one of Britain's best, Richard Holmes.

A professor at the University of East Anglia, he has written biographies of Shelley, Coleridge and Samuel Johnson, and now The Age Of Wonder, about the 18th-century scientists who inspired the writers.

Holmes gave his 10 commandments of biography writing ("Thou shalt not envy thy neighbour's novel"), said 4000 new biographies were published every year in Britain and named three quintessentially Australian biographies that changed the form: Patrick White by David Marr, The Boyd Family by Brenda Niall and Rose Boys by Peter Rose. He said Australia was "on the edge of a golden age that is about to happen with the younger writers coming up".

Holmes is a romantic legend for meeting his future wife, British novelist Rose Tremain, on a flight to Adelaide Writers' Week in 1992. Why is she not with him this time? For the excellent reason that she is 40,000 words into a novel and must not break the spell.

Anyone with lingering doubts about whether Helen Garner's book The Spare Room is a novel or just thinly disguised memoir should pay attention to this week's news that she has won the Queensland Premier's award for fiction. She also won last month's Victorian Premier's fiction award. Story is one thing but, as they say, it's all in the writing.

Stage-managed book releases are increasingly common, especially for children's books. At 2.01pm today, Sydney time, Brisingr, the third volume in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini, will go on sale worldwide. Random House Australia says this is the biggest initial print-run it has done for any book and 2.5 million copies go on sale in the US. American Paolini was 15 when he wrote Eragon, published in 2003, and followed up with Eldest. The fantasy books have sold more than 13 million and Eragon became a big-budget movie with John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons.

James Frey's fat, new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, carries an aggressive disclaimer: "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable." It's fiction, so why does he need to remind us?

Read on, though, and you encounter earnest historical snippets about the city of Los Angeles, inserted among the made-up lives of a closeted gay actor, a homeless alcoholic, a housekeeper and a runaway teenage couple. But beware. "It's maybe 80 per cent true," says Frey of his pseudo-history.

It is disorienting to learn, for example, that Howard Caughy, who bought LA's first automobile and died in a crash three weeks later, is a confection named after a friend of Frey. And that three of the four gangs in the city's first gang war in 1906 are made up.

This mixing of fact, fiction and faction is a clever joke on readers and, even more, on the media. "I did it very deliberately to give the finger," says Frey, drinking a double cappuccino during a brief stop in Sydney on his way to the Brisbane Writers' Festival. Fifteen years after his last drink, he still has the intense, obsessive energy of the ex-addict.

Not everyone gets the joke. His US publisher, HarperCollins, made him sign a 40-page document detailing exactly which parts of the book were true and which weren't. They have reason to be anxious.

Three years ago, Oprah Winfrey devoted her television book club to A Million Little Pieces, Frey's 2003 memoir about a gruelling two months he spent in a rehab clinic recovering from a youth of alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and near-death. The book - already a bestseller - went on to sales of 6 million in the US, 8 million around the world and almost 100,000 in Australia. In the sequel, My Friend Leonard, he wrote about his return to "normal" life under protection from a Mafia boss.

Months after Winfrey's tearful promotion, an investigative website exposed parts of Frey's books as being fabricated to make him look tougher than he was. He had not spent three months in jail, it was a matter of hours. His role in a woman's death was invented. Excruciating dentistry was not, as graphically described, done without drugs.

Winfrey demanded another appearance by Frey to confess and apologise. Labelled a liar, he was hounded by the media, dumped by his publisher, and hit with a class-action suit by "cheated" readers.

He retorted that he had tried to sell the book as fiction but Nan Talese, the respected Random House publisher, insisted memoir would sell better.

The books now appear with remorseful notes to readers, who continue to buy them in large numbers. A Million Little Pieces is "90 per cent true", he says now; My Friend Leonard somewhat less.

To his credit, Frey has lifted his life out of chaos and kept on writing. He lives in New York's SoHo with his wife, Maya, and their three-year-old daughter. His friends are artists, bankers and just a few writers. After a stint writing and directing in Hollywood, he prefers art essays and his own compelling brand of literature.

"I had no intention of writing a book that would sell 100 copies and get a write-up in the local paper," he says. "My goal was to be one of the most influential and most important writers of my time. I wanted my writing to be unlike anything that preceded it, devoid of influence, unique, new, fresh and reflective of the time we live in. I wasn't a guy burning to tell my story of recovery; that was just the best story I had."

Frey's writing is instantly recognisable for its minute detail, repetitive sentences, minimal punctuation and incantatory rhythms, which he writes while listening to music. He dislikes labels such as "memoir" and "novel", and rather sees his books as "art". His literary heroes are rule-breakers such as Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Arthur Rimbaud. They blurred fact and fiction, he says, and all got "massacred".

Frey admits he made mistakes. Still, he has emerged with his confidence intact. In the US he does stage appearances with rock bands and video screens. Young readers flock to his Facebook and MySpace pages.

"I'm just one of those punk kids on a skateboard trying to get into trouble," he says. So, for his next trick, he is writing a book about a New Yorker who believes he is the Messiah. He calls it "the third book of the Bible".

Is it all true? He gives me a challenging look and replies: "Were the first two?"

John Green, a company director and former Macquarie banker, has long wondered how he could boost Australian writing. Last week he gave $16,000 to sponsor an award for newspaper feature writing in the industry's Walkleys after Fairfax Media, the Herald's publisher, withdrew support for the international journalism award during a journalists' strike. But he has bigger plans.

Green has set up Pantera Press, which he hopes will start publishing next year "good reads that are really well written". Other publishers would say they have that covered. But Green, who writes business books and - so far unpublished - thrillers, sees a gap in a market dominated by overseas reprints and local literary prize contenders.

"My perception is it's almost impossible for mass-market fiction by new authors to get published here. And if you want to find the Australian John Grisham or Jodi Picoult, they wouldn't get reviewed."

He wants to invest in first-rate editing, such as he has received from American Bill Thompson, who discovered Grisham and Stephen King. "The objective is to make buckets of money to invest in more authors and philanthropy connected with reading and literacy."

Turnaround on topical books keeps speeding up. Joe Hilley's Sarah Palin: A New Kind Of Leader will be out in the US on October 10 from Zondervan, a Christian publisher owned by HarperCollins.

The biography of the Republican vice-presidential candidate is summarised as "exploring themes from her career in politics, her life as a hockey mom and her strongly held Christian faith, explaining how they influence her new style of leadership and align with our changing economy in the information age". Hilley - "one of the most significant Alabama writers working today" - has written legal thrillers and "helped a couple of people with their autobiographies". Already out in June was Kaylene Johnson's Sarah: How A Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down - now reissued with "Alaska" deleted from the title.

Former wharfie Wayne Grogan received high praise from Bob Carr at last week's launch of his third novel, Heavy Allies, a deeply researched crime novel set amid the real crimes and characters behind Australia's notorious, CIA-backed Nugan Hand Bank. Yes, launches are always love fests but Carr told the crowd at the Hero of Waterloo Hotel in The Rocks that Grogan was "Australia's James Ellroy". In his book My Reading Life, Carr says he doesn't read detective fiction except for Ellroy, whose The Big Nowhere is "simply one of the best novels ever written".

Despite its theme of "bliss, blasphemy and belief", the inaugural $5000 Blake Poetry Prize had none of the controversy of the Blake Prize for religious art. Mark Tredinnick (winner of the 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize and this year's Calibre Essay Prize) won from 1032 entrants with his poem Have You Seen,

which begins:

"The way the trees - that sclerophyll fraternity on the mountain - swarm
like Dante's shades as you drive among them in the rain on the way down
to Bridget's place, as though you were the only still thing left on earth?"

He was also highly commended for a second poem, Paradise, along with Chloe Wilson for Dorothy Wordsworth, Boiling Turnips. The poems will be published in Wet Ink magazine and are on display in handmade artists' books at Sydney's National Art School until October 4.

John Howard is inviting publishers to his Phillip Street office to test interest in his unwritten political memoirs.

The publishing director of HarperCollins, Shona Martyn, visited the former prime minister last week with her chief executive, Robert Gorman, and publisher Amruta Slee.

"We would be very keen to publish him," Martyn says. "He had a very broad career that spanned such a long period of time. He spent more than 30 years at the top level of political life; we tend to forget that and focus on recent times. On a historical basis alone, it is important. If he didn't write a book, there would be a missing link."

Howard intends to write the book himself and there is no planned publication date.

Meanwhile, Peter Costello is milking attention for The Costello Memoirs, co-written with his father-in-law, Peter Coleman, by holding out on an announcement about his political future. An embargo on the contents of the book, due in shops on September 17, is being controlled as tightly as any Harry Potter novel.

Publisher MUP requires booksellers to order copies and sign a confidentiality agreement by Monday. Cartons will carry the mysterious label "MUP advertised line". Fairfax newspapers, including the Herald, will run advance extracts and Ray Martin will interview Costello on 60 Minutes before he sets out on a national tour.

Despite a poor sales record for political memoirs, MUP is selling this one as "the political book of the year ... a full and frank account by the longest serving Treasurer in Australian history [and] the first insider's account of the engine room of the Liberal Party and the Howard government."

Michael Robotham's novel Shatter has won the fiction award at the Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime fiction. Shatter is also shortlisted for Britain's CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and Robotham, who lives in London, has just finished a busy month in Australia promoting his commissioned novel Bombproof, which was given away with every book sold during the Books Alive campaign in August. At the Ned Kellys, the first novel award went to The Low Road by Chris Womersley; the nonfiction award was won by Red Centre, Dark Heart by Evan McHugh; and Marele Day won a lifetime achievement award.

Undercover did not travel south for the Melbourne Writers' Festival over the past two weekends, so was interested to hear mixed reports. Of most interest was the move from the cramped Malthouse Theatre to the buildings around Federation Square.

Director Rosemary Cameron was delighted that the bigger space and central location fed a 40 per cent increase in attendances to 45,000. Two thousand of them heard Germaine Greer's opening address on rage at the Melbourne Town Hall. Some people enjoyed the buzz around the square, centred in its cafe. Others, especially those on stage, found the dark, windowless theatres cavernous and unfriendly, the bookshop too far from events and the events too dissipated. David Malouf was overheard expressing his horror at living in the century that produced such ugly buildings.